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Posts from the ‘Joy Jacobson’ Category

Mar 23

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Too Drunk to Consent: Alcohol and Rape in Steubenville, and Beyond

Joy Jacobson is the CHMP’s poet-in-residence. Follow her on Twitter: @joyjaco.

As soon as the “delinquent” verdict came in on Sunday in the Steubenville rape case—Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond were convicted in juvenile court of raping an unconscious 16-year-old girl and photographing themselves in action—the nasty tweets began appearing. “But it’s the girl’s fault too,” read one. “She is 16 and got drunk till she passed out.” The author of that tweet has since apologized for his victim-blaming. Others were on the receiving end of such outrage that they deleted their Twitter accounts, while a few have staunchly defended their position that the girl was asking for it—“just a loose drunk slut.” tumblr_inline_mjttwzL9e11qawfnh

It’s a shockingly pervasive attitude about a dismayingly prevalent crime. If you do a Google news search using the terms “drunk” and “rape” you will find thousands of references to the Steubenville case, but it is far from the only one.

  • Last December Dennis Hanson and Bojan Vuckovic, in Fort Collins, Colorado, allegedly raped and injured two young women whom they had given shots of vodka. Hanson made a video of the event on his cell phone, which was recently played in court. Hanson was heard saying, “Do you want me to [expletive] you? Just tell me yes. Nod your head. . . . Can I do whatever I want to you?”
  • Last summer Gregory Basped and Lester Green “picked up” a woman at a Sheboygan, Wisconsin, bar, and when she passed out they raped her in her home. The two men were sentenced to five and eight years, respectively, in prison. 
  • Markley Charles was convicted in Norristown, Pennsylvania, of attacking a 15-year-old girl who was unconscious at a party. “He took advantage of her youth, her level of intoxication and the fact that she was passed out for his own sexual gain,” the judge said. 

And let’s not forget the two New York City police officers, Kenneth Moreno and Franklin Mata, acquitted in 2011 of raping an intoxicated woman in her apartment—a case complicated by the fact that “defense lawyers pounced on the credibility of the woman because she was very drunk on the night in question and did not remember many details,” the New York Times reported.

They pounced on the credibility of the woman because she was drunk. It really is that blatantly sexist, isn’t it? Yes, says Helen Redmond in a post called “Is Alcohol the New Short Skirt?”—a look at our society’s condemnation of the woman who drinks as louche and loose and deserving of whatever she gets. Perhaps that’s what is at the root of the invective heaped on the 16-year-old rape victim in the Steubenville case; she has received death threats and other forms of condemnation from both men and women via social media. “Society puts the onus on women to keep themselves safe and avoid dangerous situations,” Redmond says. “So if a woman is drunk, she isn’t taking her personal security seriously and is responsible for what happens to her.”

This to me defines “rape culture”—that we live in a world where too often a woman’s inability to consent to sex means she’s fair game. Redmond cites a study of more than 1,800 men, of whom 120 admitted to committing ”acts of interpersonal violence, including rape, battery, and child physical and sexual abuse”; 80% of those said they had assaulted women incapacitated by drugs or alcohol.

It evidently has to be said again and again that the only thing that constitutes sexual consent is an actual “yes.”

Circleof6_BeautyShot_WEBOne tool that could empower young women is the Circle of 6 cellphone app, which allows a user to send out a “help” message to the six chosen friends in her circle if a date gets uncomfortable or she needs a ride home. It seems brilliant; in a country where only 54% of rapes are reported and a small fraction of those end up with convictions, we will need lots of innovations like this to begin to turn around the attitudes that underlie these crimes.

CORRECTIONS, April 2: In the original post I had incorrectly stated the number of men in this study who had claimed to have raped women. It was 120, not 1,800. Also, I added the word “allegedly” to the discussion of the case of Dennis Hanson and Bojan Vuckovic, who have not yet been convicted of the crimes they’ve been charged with.

Feb 13

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Narrative Medicine Special Event in Brooklyn

Jim Stubenrauch is a senior fellow at the CHMP.

A quick notice about an upcoming event—this Friday—for anyone interested in narrative medicine and interdisciplinary studies in health sciences and the humanities:page-0

The New York City College of Technology kicks off “Comparative Perspectives on Health, Illness, and Healing,” a new NEH-funded curriculum development project that supports collaboration between CUNY faculty in the health care professions and the humanities. The year-long project explores “the practice of medicine as an expression of beliefs and value systems that differ across cultures.” Rita Charon, MD, PhD, founder of Columbia University’s Program in Narrative Medicine is giving the keynote, “Narratives of Culture in Health, Illness, and Health Care: How We Humans Unify in the Face of Sickness.” CHMP poet-in-residence Joy Jacobson and I will also be there to discuss our writing courses and workshops for nursing students and professional nurses.

The event is scheduled for Friday, February 15, from 10:00 am to 1:00 pm, and will be held in the Atrium Amphitheatre at NYCCT, 300 Jay St (or 259 Adams St), Brooklyn, NY. Phone: 718-260-4934. Subways: A, C, and F trains to Jay Street–Metro Tech Station, or R, 2, and 4 trains to Court Street.

Hope to see you there!

Feb 1

After Hurricane Sandy, New York Nurses Respond to the Long Recovery

Joy Jacobson is a CHMP senior fellow. Follow her on Twitter: @joyjaco

After much controversy, the U.S. Senate finally approved a $50 billion Hurricane Sandy relief package on Monday, which President Obama signed on Tuesday night. It took nearly three months for Congress to endorse the aid—a delay that many residents of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, especially those most severely affected, found inexcusable.

At Coney Island Hospital in mid-December, imaging equipment damaged by the storm surge. Photo: Jocelyn Augustino, FEMA

At Coney Island Hospital in mid-December, imaging equipment damaged by the storm surge. Photo: Jocelyn Augustino, FEMA

My report on how four New York City hospitals damaged in the hurricane have fared in the weeks after—and how the city’s nurses have responded—appears in the February issue of the American Journal of Nursing. Bellevue Hospital, the Veterans Affairs Medical Center, NYU’s Langone Medical Center, and Coney Island Hospital all had to evacuate patients and remained closed or only partially reopened for many weeks.

The slow recovery has affected the lives of many patients and clinicians. Some say the recovery is taking too long. Mary Fitzgerald, a nurse at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx and a member of the New York State Nurses Association, participated in December in a protest at the home of Mayor Michael Bloomberg to demand a stronger response from the city. Fitzgerald told me:

In our great city, unfortunately, there was an inadequate disaster plan, and the entire hospital infrastructure was stressed. If people don’t evacuate, then what? If a storm can knock out all of this, what do we do? The city has got to be more transparent. We’re looking for stronger alliances.

WNYC’s Fred Mogul reported on Wednesday that Bellevue hospital still plans to offer full services this month. But the needed repairs to the 22-story facility have included, according to Mogul, damage to the vast electrical and heating systems, water pumps, and even elevators, at a cost in the hundreds of millions of dollars.  Read more

Dec 14

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The Value of Story in Debating Health Care Reform

This post is by CHMP senior fellows Jim Stubenrauch and Joy Jacobson, co-founders of the program in Narrative Writing for Health Care Professionals. Follow them on Twitter: @jimstuben and @joyjaco. Woman Reading

When talking about the work we do here at the CHMP, bringing workshops and classes in writing reflective narratives to nurses and nursing students, we occasionally get puzzled looks. Why teach writing to nurses?

A recent essay in the Narrative Matters section of the journal Health Affairs exemplifies the power of nurses’ narratives and the way personal stories can illuminate larger policy issues.

In “A Nurse Learns Firsthand That You May Fend for Yourself After a Hospital Stay,” Beth Ann Swan tells of a dire medical ordeal: while in Chicago on a business trip, her husband was hospitalized after a brain stem stroke. “In an instant,” Swan writes,

we were thrown into the unreal world of medical “care coordination” and “transition management.” There would be no easy way for us to get Eric from a hospital there to a hospital here and then to home. And along the way there would be gaps in the care Eric received—gaps so large they were more like chasms. We just didn’t know it yet.

It fell to Swan, dean and professor at the Jefferson School of Nursing at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, to coordinate all aspects of her husband’s recovery, including his transfer from Chicago to a rehab facility in Philadelphia. Even with all of her nursing knowledge and medical contacts, Swan found the following year of coordinating Eric’s outpatient care nearly all-consuming.

In addition to telling this compelling personal story, Swan goes on to advocate one of the strategies for health care reform supported by the Affordable Care Act. Often overlooked in political debates and mainstream media coverage, the ACA’s transitional care initiatives offer real hope of improving health care by bridging the many gaps in our fragmented health care system.

Nurses play a crucial role in transitional care. Swan writes that her husband’s hospital nurses answered questions at any time but that after Eric’s discharge—when they needed as much help as they did during his hospitalization—the nurses were nowhere to be found:

As a patient’s wife, I would have welcomed having an RN as a point of contact. As a nursing school dean, I know the evidence demonstrating that registered nurses are critical to the operational and financial success of health care delivery systems. . . . I also know that nurses have the expertise to bridge care transitions and are critical to coordinating care across all settings.

Swan shows how a well-told story can bring home, with urgent poignancy, a complex topic like transitional care and explain why it should be part of the ACA. (For more on the ACA’s support of new transitional care models, see CHMP co-director Diana Mason’s recent HealthCetera blog post.)

Fitzhugh Mullan, a physician who founded the Narrative Matters column in Health Affairs, said in an interview published in the Permanente Journal that he defined the policy narrative as “an essay form that falls between the editorial and the short story or memoir.” He goes on to say, Read more

Nov 5

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In Far Rockaway with Occupy Sandy

Joy Jacobson is the CHMP’s poet-in-residence. Follow her on Twitter: @joyjaco

“We have hot food and bottled water for you!”

I was in a dark hallway of the JASA towers, a senior housing complex in Far Rockaway, Queens, yesterday, with two other women volunteers, shouting into a closed apartment door. I had met the women a few hours earlier at an Occupy Sandy outpost at a church in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. The towers had been without power for six days. Most of the elderly residents had found shelter elsewhere, but many remained. This woman was hesitant to open her door to us but wanted

The boardwalk at Rockaway. Photo by dakine kane, via Flickr

to know: What kind of hot food did we have? Pasta, we yelled, or rice and chick peas. We could bring her some other items, like powdered milk, trash bags, toothpaste, we said, if only she would tell us what she needed.

Occupy Sandy is a hybrid that arose out of catastrophic need. The Occupy Wall Street movement united with 350.org, a coalition dedicated to “solving the climate crisis,” and Recovers.org, a firm specializing in disaster-recovery software, to form one of the most coherent, organized, and relevant community resources in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. Coming into contact with them just days before the presidential election, I’m reminded of the power of community.

After the woman took a hot meal and some toothpaste, I walked back down the hallway (really, I’m not afraid of the dark but I did find it eerie to be feeling my way in total darkness) and came into a lighted area where I saw a sign for the visiting nurse. I banged on the door, not expecting an answer, and was surprised when a nurse opened the door and introduced herself. She invited me to go with her to the ninth floor to check on a few residents. Read more

Oct 5

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Poetry, Politics, & American Rage

About a hundred billion tweets ago, in the middle of June, the writer Sherman Alexie sent out this tweet: “What is most

Poster for 100 Thousand Poets for Change

lacking from American poetry: humor and rage.” I’ve thought of this brief literary criticism off and on ever since. I’ve seen plenty of humor in contemporary poems—even the Poetry Foundation now bestows a prestigious poetry prizefor humorous poems—but what about rage? I’ve not heard of any awards given for rageful poetry.
But that doesn’t mean there aren’t poets putting their rage to use. Just last week, on September 29, poetry readings and other events were sponsored worldwide by a grassroots group, 100 Thousand Poets for Change. According to their Web site, these events seek to address societal ills like “wars, ecocide, the lack of affordable medical care, racism” through a community focus on the arts and “peace and sustainability.” In its inaugural year, 2011, there were 650 events in 550 cities.

A similar movement in the United States, Split This Rock, seeks to “celebrate the poetry of witness and provocation” and urge poets to assume “a greater role in public life.” The organizers took the name from a poem by Langston Hughes,” Big Buddy”:

Don’t you hear this hammer ring?
I’m gonna split this rock
And split it wide!
When I split this rock,
Stand by my side.

Poet and novelist Alice Walker, in an interview published earlier this year, in conjunction with the Split This Rock festival where she presented her work, said that the best poetry “cuts through to the heart of what’s of value in life. To really be true to your own spirit. To be awake and develop patience so that you truly understand what it is you’re trying to do, desire, and who in fact you really are. … It’s a wonderful gift to the planet.”

I shouldn’t take a tweet too seriously, but Alexi hit on something I don’t often articulate. I’ve had some of my poems published, and even won a prize or two. I have an MFA in poetry. I’ve given readings. But what value does poetry really have in our society? His comment on rage got me thinking about how vital poetry is and has been in many cultures worldwide. Neruda, of course, was revered as a poet and statesman in Chile before the coup in the early ‘70s, illustrating Shelley’s famous quip that “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” And poetry is a life-and-death endeavor for some: just yesterday a Tibetan poet self-immolated in protest against China’s policies in his homeland.

But in the United States? Quick: can you name a living American poet? Okay, can you recite a favorite poems by one of your contemporaries? Or (**gasp**) can you imagine Kay Ryan moderating a presidential debate?

As we head into high debate season in this last month of the presidential campaigns, we all might do well to take a look at this sampler of political poems at the Poetry Foundation. Here’s one stanza, by poet Fred Merchant:

I think that if my tongue alone could talk
it would swear
in any court that poetry
tastes like the iodine in blood,
or the copper in spit, and makes a salt stronger than tears.

Next week I’ll post on poetry, empathy, and health care reform.

Aug 28

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Prolonged Mechanical Ventilation: Does It Cause Needless Suffering?

The author of this guest post, Mauricio Berrio Orozco, RN, is a graduate student at the Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing. Last spring he attended a writing course for graduate nursing students co-taught by Jim Stubenrauch and Joy Jacobson, CHMP senior fellows. Click here for a post about a previous semester’s class.

As a nurse, I have experienced plenty of difficult situations that patients and their families go through during hospitalization. But nothing can compare to the suffering that results from prolonged mechanical ventilation, the long-term placement of a breathing tube that’s needed as a result of conditions such as anoxic brain injury or massive stroke.

By Hfastedge from Wikimedia Commons

Most of my patients are elderly. Many of them are conscious, but a good prognosis is basically impossible. They do not have even the slightest chance of recovering their previous level of functioning. Instead of getting better or at least being stable (normal vital signs, no signs of cardiac or respiratory distress), they develop problems related to mechanical ventilation. For instance, their muscles atrophy from inactivity, which then progresses to severe muscular and joint contractures. In addition, huge pressure ulcers can develop, as can ventilator-associated pneumonia, rapidly making the situation worse. No matter how excellent the care these patients get, their quality of life will only worsen if such complications are present. Read more

Aug 9

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Out Loud and In Writing

The following guest post is by Patricia Wagner Dodson, a fiction writer and research nurse at Massey Cancer Center, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA. She recently attended Telling Stories, Discovering Voice: A Writing Weekend for Nurses, led by Jim Stubenrauch and Joy Jacobson and co-sponsored by the CHMP and Hunter–Bellevue School of Nursing. Pat blogs at StoryStreams: fiction as comfort.

"Storyteller Under Sunny Skies," a clay sculpture in the permanent collection of The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis

Storyteller Under Sunny Skies, Rose Pecos-Sun Rhodes, Jemez Pueblo, NM

I’m a nurse, I might say.

But I don’t say it. I qualify it. I spin it. I elaborate on it. I never just say it.

I’ve often wondered why.

I used to think it might be because it sounds so ordinary. I imagine that the person I am speaking to might conjure up an image of a woman in white going from room to room, dispensing medications, holding the hands of the dying, recording the responses to treatment, changing IV fluids. I did that for six months when I graduated from nursing school. I was exhausted and miserable, and it nearly sent me back to my old job, the job I had before I became a nurse. Read more

Aug 2

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“When I hear my own voice, I . . . ”

Jim Stubenrauch is a CHMP senior fellow.

Photo by Amy Dixon

What I’m feeling right now in my body is a sense of comfort and familiarity, even though there are a few aches and pains. I’m an old blue work shirt hung across the back of a chair, and that’s fine for now. The breathing exercise we just did gives me a feeling of warmth and pleasure that flows down my arms and
legs. . . .
That’s what I was writing on a Friday morning two weeks ago, to a prompt from CHMP poet-in-residence Joy Jacobson, at the start of “Telling Stories, Discovering Voice: A Writing Weekend for Nurses,” a three-day writing intensive cosponsored by the CHMP and the Hunter–Bellevue School of Nursing. Joy and I led the workshop—the first of many, we hope—and joined in the writing exercises. I’m still processing what turned out to be an incredibly rich experience.

We had a small but surprisingly diverse group of nurses, nine in all (a good size: large enough to make for lively discussion, small enough to preserve intimacy). Some were beginning writers; others, more experienced. We spent the weekend writing, reading, and sharing stories. Read more

Jun 25

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On Poetry & Sleep: “After dying” by Sam Magill


Joy Jacobson is the CHMP’s poet-in-resdence. Follow her on Twitter: @joyjaco

Photo by Sam Magill


The CHMP’s co-founder Barbara Glickstein put me in touch with a friend of hers, the poet, photographer, and leadership consultant Sam Magill. The author of Fully Human, a book of poems, Magill has offered us one of his poems that seems to illuminate something I have rarely thought about: how much sleep is like dying and waking like birth.

After dying

This is how I want to wake up after dying:
To slowly become aware as light tiptoes into the room,
To have gentle thoughts that coalesce from dreams—
Soft and fragile, then as clear and focused as the morning air—
To know that after all the difficult passages of a former life
I can smile again and look forward to the day,
Knowing who I have always been,
Knowing exactly what I love,
And what those persistent angels
Have always wanted me to do.

Sleeping and waking, insomnia, reverie, dreams: these are the realms of the poet. Samuel Taylor Coleridge called sleep “the wide blessing.” Theodore Roethke, in one of the great villanelles, wrote: “I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.” Robert Bly fancied “Our whole body [as] like a harbor at dawn.” The poet Anne Carson, in her wonderful literary exploration in praise of sleep, described it as “that slab of outlaw time punctuating every pillow.”

We aren’t certain why we sleep—brain “maintenance” and governance of the timing of our behavior are recent theories—only that we must. And so we turn to the poets. I’ll give the last word to Sam Magill, who has this to say about the poem:

There is something magical about waking up. William Shakespeare described sleep as “death’s other self,” and so waking up is like being born again. Likewise, as we move through chapters of our lives we experience places of confusion and loss—a career reaching its end, a relationship that is finished, a loss of identity—and when we find our next orientation, there can be a great sense of having died to one thing and beginning a new life. This poem began one morning when the first sensation I had was that of “gentle thoughts that coalesce from dreams.” The space between dreaming and being fully awake is, indeed, magical. It has been called “liminal,” a time when our rational self is not yet activated and our deeper sense of knowing still informs us. Some sort of wholeness emerges there, and I say we are in desperate need of that wisdom in our times.

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